Andrew Motion

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Biography

Professor Andrew Motion was born in London on 26 October 1952, and read English at University College, Oxford. He taught English at the University of Hull (1976-81) where he met the poet Philip Larkin. He was editor of Poetry Review (1981-83) and was Poetry Editor and Editorial Director at London publishers Chatto & Windus (1983-89). He succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been Chairman of the Arts Council of England's Literature Panel since 1996. An acclaimed poet (and champion of poetry), critic, biographer and lecturer, Andrew Motion became Poet Laureate in 1999, succeeding Ted Hughes.

He was awarded the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for his poem 'Inland', included in his first collection of poems, The Pleasure Steamers, published in 1977. His poetry collections include Independence (1981); Secret Narratives (1983); Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984 (1984), which won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Natural Causes (1987), which won the Dylan Thomas Award; The Price of Everything (1994); Salt Water (1997) and Selected Poems 1976-1997 (1998).

Andrew Motion is also the author of several acclaimed biographies including The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit (1986), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1993), which won the Whitbread Biography Award; a life of John Keats published in 1997; and Wainewright the Poisoner (2000), an account of the life of Thomas Wainewright, critic, forger, painter and suspected murderer.

Andrew Motion lives in London. His collection of poems Public Property was published in 2002. His new short novel, The Invention of Dr Cake, which combines elements of mystery and detective fiction, was published in 2003. 

A memoir, In The Blood, was published in 2006, and a selection of his autobiographical and critical writings, Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets in (2008). His latest collection of poems is The Cinder Path (2009).

Andrew Motion received a knighthood in 2009.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Biography, Fiction, Poetry

Bibliography

Goodnestone: A Sequence   Workshop Press, 1972

Inland   Cygnet Press, 1976

The Pleasure Steamers   Sycamore Press, 1977

The Poetry of Edward Thomas   Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980

Independence   Salamander Press, 1981

Philip Larkin   Methuen, 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry   (editor with Blake Morrison)   Penguin, 1982

Secret Narratives   Salamander Press, 1983

Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984   Salamander Press / Penguin, 1984

The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit   Chatto & Windus, 1986

Natural Causes   Chatto & Windus, 1987

Two Poems   Words, 1988

Love in a Life   Faber and Faber, 1991

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life   Faber and Faber, 1993

New Writing 2   (editor with Malcolm Bradbury)   Minerva in association with the British Council, 1994

New Writing 3   (editor with Candace Rodd)   Minerva in association with the British Council, 1994

Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy   (editor)   Dent, 1994

The Price of Everything   Faber and Faber, 1994

Keats: A Biography   Faber and Faber, 1997

Penguin Modern Poets: Volume 11   (Michael Donaghy, Andrew Motion, Hugo Williams)   Penguin, 1997

Salt Water   Faber and Faber, 1997

Selected Poems 1976-1997   Faber and Faber, 1998

John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion   Faber and Faber, 2000

Wainewright the Poisoner   Faber and Faber, 2000

Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry   (editor)   Faber and Faber, 2001

Public Property   Faber and Faber, 2002

101 Poems Against War   (Afterword)   Faber and Faber, 2003

First World War Poems   (editor)   Faber and Faber, 2003

The Invention of Dr Cake   Faber and Faber, 2003

In The Blood   Faber and Faber, 2006

Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets   Faber and Faber, 2008

The Cinder Path   Faber and Faber, 2009

Read about books by Andrew Motion at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Andrew Motion at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1975   Newdigate Prize   Inland

1976   Eric Gregory Award

1981   Arvon Foundation/Observer International Poetry Competition   The Letter

1984   Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984

1987   Dylan Thomas Award   Natural Causes

1987   Somerset Maugham Award   The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit

1993   Whitbread Biography Award   Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life

2009   KBE

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Critical Perspective

Andrew Motion is the current Poet Laureate, whose most recent collection, Public Property (2002), reflects historic traditions with its public elegies (for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother) while also deploying his characteristic lyrical-elegiac manner to memorialize friends and family members. Perhaps most striking, however, are two poems that specifically invoke his predecessors as Laureate. ‘The Dog of the Light Brigade’ recalls Tennyson’s iconic poem, only to take a sardonic dog-level view of that doomed cavalry charge during the Crimean War. A pampered fox terrier joins in, ‘a maddening brown-and-white blur / at the corner of everyone’s eye’, before ‘strutting off’ to the stables and falling asleep. With ‘The Fox Provides for Himself’, the reference is to Ted Hughes’s equally iconic ‘The Thought Fox’. But Motion’s fox is very much a contemporary animal, playing in a suburban garden, being observed through a window ‘fold his dainty front paws, stick his ramrod brush in the air, / angle his plough-shaped mask to the grass’. A sub-plot concerns the couple who are watching; the sight bringing them romantically closer for the moment, holding hands then letting go as he leaves: ‘hardly a fox now, more like a trickle of rust’.

By his busy schedule of media appearances, readings, lectures and broadcasting, Motion has given the Laureateship a much higher profile with the public, and a new role as an ‘ambassador’ for poetry. His personal interests are well-reflected in a new book of essays, Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets (2008), with pieces on Romantics John Clare and Keats’s painter friend Joseph Severn, and including Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy and Ivor Gurney. Motion is also a prize-winning biographer, his first being a collective portrait of the self-destructive lives of The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit (1986). Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993) is easily his most controversial, and commercially successful. His 1997 biography of John Keats led to significant fictional spin-offs. In The Invention of Dr Cake (2003), Keats returns from Italy to conduct a secret life as a doctor; and in Wainewright the Poisoner (2000), Motion mixes 19th-century pastiche with biographical research.

 Motion has been an influential figure within British poetry since the 1980s, being an editor for two leading publishers, and especially as co-editor (with Blake Morrison) of a landmark anthology, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). This declared that ‘a shift of sensibility’ had taken place, in which poets were not ‘working in a confessional white heat but [as] dramatists and storytellers’. Motion himself was identified early on as a lyrical poet of what Philip Larkin called ‘tender, sharp observation’. He also developed, from Independence (1981) to Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984 (1984) and beyond, a vein of elliptical ‘secret narratives’ set in places such as Imperial India, the First World War, and post-war France. Writing in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (Spring 1997), Motion observed that ‘My wish to write a poem is inseparable from my wish to explain something to myself’, while combining the lyrical and the narrative.

The most significant ‘something’ in his work was undoubtedly his mother’s riding accident and her subsequent deep coma. ‘In the Attic’, from The Pleasure Steamers (1977), written when his mother was still alive, remains his most memorable poem of mourning for her. Its narrator is taking her clothes out of a trunk and ‘trying to relive / time you wore them’, lifting ‘patterns of memory’, and imagining ‘all your unfinished lives / … entering my head as dust’. Each of his subsequent collections contains reflections of her. In a much more recent poem ‘Serenade’, the horse involved in her accident is depicted in its later life, ‘with her girlish flounce and conker-coloured arse’, but neglected and ‘waiting for something important to happen, only nothing ever did’.  

Love in a Life (1991) presented other deeply personal matter (albeit obliquely), in scenes from his two marriages. The first part contains ‘Bad Dreams’ but also contrasting hospital visits to see ‘our twins’ and ‘my mother asleep, / or at least not awake’. Episodes from an earlier, failing relationship are ruefully recalled, ’When first we were married / and I was Edward Thomas, / and you were no more Helen / than bloody Marie of Romania’ (‘Toot Baldon’). In a differing vein are the poems about researching the life and work of Philip Larkin, (his friend and erstwhile colleague at Hull University). ‘I’ve been over to root up my man’, one reports, but ‘His houses are both torn down’ and ‘his woman has moved’ (‘Belfast’). The biography’s main contention, that Larkin ‘lived a much more dramatic and intense life than he let on, though it was performed on an inner stage’, was borne out and enhanced by the wealth of previously-unknown manuscript material that Motion (as one of Larkin’s executors) had access to.

The poems in Salt Water (1997) were mostly written when Motion was researching his biography Keats (1997). The second part is a prose journal of a sea voyage to Naples in 1995, undertaken to parallel Keats’s own final journey. (Water, threatening or otherwise, is indeed prominent throughout Motion’s writing.). The opening poem, ‘Fresh Water’ is one of his most admired. It opens ‘a long time ago’, recalling a boyhood search with his brother for the source of the Thames, the succeeding episodes resolving into an elegy for a friend who drowned in ‘Marchionness’ pleasure boat disaster on the river. She is envisioned ‘swimming back upstream, her red velvet party dress / flickering around her heels as she twists through the locks / and dreams round the slow curves’. 

Motion chose to write In the Blood (2005), subtitled ‘A Memoir of my Childhood’, from the point of view of his teenage self, thus introducing a fictional element. This freed him to present closely observed details of at times harrowing prep school life and uneasy family life. His mother’s accident begins and ends the book, but the most memorable scenes are re-creations of his first experiences of hunting a fox (later, on holiday in Scotland with his father, a stag), and being ‘blooded’. The book further underlines his mother’s significance in his writing life by revealing her as the source of several significant poems - ‘The Letter’, for instance, (his 1981 Arvon Foundation/Observer International Poetry Competition-winning poem) about a girl in wartime observing a German pilot fatally baling out) and the class-consciousness of ‘The Spoilt Child’, in which the family pet dog is horribly attacked, observed by the child riding out with his mother. Andrew Motion is a writer who has successfully blurred the boundaries between poetry, biography and fiction. From initially looking like a latter-day Georgian poet, Motion has gone on to something more complex: combining ‘the English line’ with a nervy postmodern-romantic sensibility. One wonders how his work will develop once he ceases to be Poet Laureate – unavoidably a public figure - in 2009.

Dr Jules Smith, 2008 

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Author statement

'My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. I can't predict when this relationship will flower. If I try to goad it into existence I merely engage with one side of my mind or the other, and the poem suffers.

I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin.'

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Further reading on this site

Cambridge Seminar
The Cambridge Seminar takes place every two years. It was last held over a week in mid-July 2009. The British Council's Cambridge Seminar on contemporary literature has influenced discussion, performance... more...   (30/06/2003)

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square London  WC1N 3AU Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034 E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk http://www.faber.co.uk

Agent United Agents 12-26 Lexington Street London  W1F 0LE England Tel: +44 (0)20 3214 0800 Fax: +44 (0)20 3214 0801 E-mail: info@unitedagents.co.uk http://www.unitedagents.co.uk

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